COVID Is Ramping Up for a Year of Deadly Surges

COVID is back. But then, it never really left. And the respiratory disease’s late-summer resurgence might be a preview of an even bigger surge this winter.

Experts say the latest bump in infections, hospitalizations, and deaths in the United States and other countries, in the fourth year of the novel coronavirus pandemic, was inevitable three years ago—when anti-science extremists all over the world began politicizing the then-brand-new vaccines.

Vaccines that, with wide enough uptake, could’ve strangled COVID and ended the pandemic as early as 2021. Instead, vaccination rates in most countries stalled out well below the 90-percent threshold necessary to produce population-level immunity.